Joplin’s city audit received a “clean opinion,” the City Council was told at its informal meeting on Monday. “It’s as good an opinion as you can get,” David Cochran, of Cochran, Head, Vick & Co. of Kansas City, told the council.

A public policy director at a free-market government think-tank in St. Louis talked to the Joplin Kiwanis Club on Tuesday about the privatization of government services.

A Kansas City woman who won a $2.5 million Missouri Lotto prize says she plans to retire early.

The Joplin City Council on Monday night approved a special election Aug. 5 to ask voters to renew the city’s three-eighths-cent capital projects sales tax. That tax, which has been used to pay for annual street paving as well as major street and bridge projects, was first passed by voters in 2004 and expires Jan. 1.

The Kansas Health Foundation announced Monday that it will provide a total of $50,000 to two organizations to assist the Baxter Springs area and its residents with recovery efforts after the April 27 EF-2 tornado. About 100 of the city’s 2,000 homes were damaged, as were 12 businesses.

Joplin resident Bradley Crane started smoking when he was 16 and didn’t stop until he was 29. In the years between, he had a nightly ritual. “I dragged myself outside to smoke to make sure a cigarette was the last thing I did for the day — that’s how quickly we metabolize nicotine — and then in the morning, that’s the first thing I did again,” he said.

A judge granted Joplin murder case defendant Jeffrey Bruner a better chance Monday at making bail. Bruner, 40, has remained in jail on a $1 million cash-only bond since his arrest in the Nov. 1 shooting death of Missouri Southern State University assistant football coach Derek Moore.

A cold front that should bring moisture to the region on Thursday and Friday could be critical for crop farmers and cow-calf operations. Most areas of Southwest Missouri and Southeast Kansas were shifted last week from a classification of being abnormally dry to moderate drought by the U.S. Drought Monitor.

Big changes have happened for Krimson Kulturr, the store that was created last fall by Pittsburg State University’s student-driven Enactus group. The store sells items made by local and international artisans.

The Southeast Board of Education is considering a proposal from a Neosho, Missouri, man for a use for the McCune Attendance Center building. The board voted in December to close the elementary school.